The second day of TechCrunch50 opened with a discussion of business apps, more for internal use within small and medium businesses and enterprises rather than end users. (This post will be hupdated as more companies present.)

Affective Interfaces was probably the coolest startup in the group. The firm manufactures emotion recognition systems, recording emotional states using Webcams. It's similar to "Lie to Me," the Fox show that uses an investigator with an uncanny knack to sense if people are lying by noting their facial expressions.

Measuring the emotional reaction to a product is an untapped market, according to Jai Haissman, the founder and chief executive. The company gathers emotional reactions to a product or piece of media. The research subjects download the software tool, which syncs the Webcam with the media as it plays back on the screen. The company then analyzes the data and provides a graph of the emotional reaction over time. The data can be broken down by demographics, age, gender, et cetera.

Haissman said that the company can build a Skype tool (I'm not clear on whether it has one or not) and take snapshots of the emotional reaction over the day. Affective is releasing an API, which is entering beta today.

CrowdFlower assembles a
"cloud labor" force. In a demo, the company asked a legion of workers
to assess tweets about the TechCruch show in a positive or negative
light. Couldn't this be automated? Sure, CrowdFlower argues, but with a
corresponding drop in accuracy. (Bad choice: no one seemed to be
tweeting with an opinion toward TechCrunch, but just announcements that
were made on the show.) Think of it as a better Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The system seems to be able to identify outliers, so really good or
really bad workers are identified. Users get paid for their work, and
the system tracks the history of tasks and individual workers.

The site's mission: "to take all the things that are awesome about
software as a service, and apply them to labor," according to Lukas
Biewald, the co-founder and chief executive. Have a little time to
kill? Check it out.

CitySourced apparently
wants to be the site to gripe about things that you don't like about
your neighborhood: a pothole, some graffiti, or what have you. The app
allows you to send your gripe directly to San Francisco, geotagged with
your location using GPS. The site also created a system to allow cities
to manage the complaints. The first customer: the city of San Jose,
which will use the tool as a citizen relationship application.

Metrics include the time to respond to a particular complaint, and
tools to examine graffiti, for example. What's interesting is that data
can be mashed up on a map, for example, to discover that the graffiti
was concentrated around schools during the summer months.

The site also announced that it has received an investment from Palm;
unsurprisingly, it will be launching on the Palm Pre in the near future.

Digg's Kevin Rose had a couple of good suggestions, asking for the
ability to subscribe to a given neighborhood, and for the site to
define actions that a citizen himself can take.

Metricly attempts to unlock data
that is tied up in disparate apps, such as CRM, sales, email campaigns,
et cetera. With Metricly, you can combine and correlate that data, to
help those apps work together. Without Metricly, aggregating the data
is a manual process, but with Metricly, all the data is at your
fingertips, according to Devin Poolman, the company's co-founder and
chief executive officer. In a demo, the company tied into Google
Analytics and made the data available to graph, then did the same for
Intuit's QuickBooks. A custom data tool allows a user to customize
their own ways of pulling in data.

Twitter and Facebook can even be tracked, with things like follower count, number of tweets, et cetera.

"Metricly is automated and easy, and you can use it every day," Poolman said. One panelist compared it to the "Mint of metrics".

ClientShow discovered that
there was no collaboration software for founder Dann Ledwick's
particular creative projects industry, so they invented it. It's based
on AIR, and there are four parts: Pad, a launching pad for clients,
with contects and projects; a section for viewing those projects;
Pitch, a collaborative pitch tool for pointing and working with the
projects themselves, with threaded notes; and Vault, realt-time storage
for the project files More importantly, Vault archives the session
reports, with a visual representation of what went on in the meeting.

ClientShow runs on top of Amazon's cloud service, allowing the company
to scale up as it needs. The company will sell directly to creative
organizations, Ledwick said. ClientShow will also combine and aggregate and sell the data it collects, but in an anonymous fashion, Ledwick revealed. [Edited 9/22/09. This is not the case, according to Dann Ledwick; we apologize for the misunderstanding.--Ed.]

Today, the company is announcing
registration for its beta program. A free version will be sold with basic functionality, and the premium version will contain more connectors.

The panelists were relatively critical, trying to gain a deeper understanding of how a discrete app would remain separate from the analysis tools provided by the individual data. Is there a real, consistent need for it, or is it a once-in-a-quarter app that's just needed to reports?

Trollim takes coding and makes it competitive. Users enter their information and take tests, usually involved in fixing bugs that the Tollim employees insert into the site. During this, the system examines the resulting coding and gives the user a certain assessment, or ranking.

After that, the system thenserves as a matchmaker for the coder to battle other codes in certain categories and languages, such as PHP. Naturally, each coder accumulates a ranking. Users can also follow (or stalk) other users, and challenge them as well.

Users can publish icons advertising for programmers as well. Trollim will also provide tools for corporations to better understand the programming skills of the coders as well.

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